Michel Foucault and liberal intelligence

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Notes

1. Michel Foucault considered this question of government over two years of his lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–8 and 1978–9. He then devoted himself to the history of subjectivation, with The Care of the Self and The Use of Pleasure (1986a, 1986b) which appeared in France in 1984, the year of his death.

2. The field of ‘governmentality studies’ was first launched in Great Britain and the USA with the publication of Burchell, Gordon and Miller (1991). It was taken up by Mitchell Dean (1999). In Germany the development of studies of governmentality was instigated by Thomas Lemke (2000).

3. There were some colloquia in France on the subject on the twentieth anniversary of Foucault's death, one at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and the other at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris. The latter resulted in a publication (Meyet, Neves, & Ribemont, 2005).

4. It recalls the analysis of The Policing of Families (Donzelot, 1979) published the previous year, in 1977, the fourth chapter of which is entitled, precisely ‘From the government of families to government through the family’ [this does not appear as a chapter heading in the English translation, but see p. 92: GB].

5. The expression ‘put on the agenda’, so dear to the political class, appeared with English utilitarianism, Foucault explains, when Bentham distinguished between what is to be done (from a liberal point of view), that is to say, the agenda, and what is not to be done, that is to say, the non-agenda.

6. With this odd expression, ‘equal inequality’, Foucault designates the neo-liberals’ idea that we are all exposed to a situation of relative inequality and that this differential does not condemn the market but makes it work … on condition that no-one is lastingly excluded from the game. [I have been unable to find any use by Foucault of the expression ‘equal inequality’ as such, but he attributes to Röpke the statement of ‘inequality’ being ‘the same for all’ (2004b, p. 148) (although Senellart notes that he has not been able to trace this statement in Röpke either). [The index refers to ‘the equality of inequality’, but again this expression does not appear in the text: GB.]

7. The Foucauldian diaspora includes partisans of the Right and Left, including the extreme Left. Do we need to note that the most notorious of the latter, Antonio Negri, appealed for a vote in favour of the proposed European Constitution out of hatred for the national level, which is seen as a brake on awareness of the reality of the ‘empire’, and he has called for the engagement of battles at this supreme level. In this, furthermore, he could give comfort only to the certainties of the partisans of the sovereign nation and of the European social model à la française.

8. This analysis is found in the lecture of 17 January 1979 (Foucault, 2004b, pp. 39ff.).

9. For an analysis of the art of neither too much nor too little in French governmentality, see Donzelot (1994 [1984]). We note, moreover, that this concern for a measure of neither too much nor too little in politics, recently promoted by Tony Blair and the ‘third way’ between the old Left and Thatcherite neo-liberalism, also gets support from a famous sociologist, Anthony Giddens.

10. We need only think of Vaincre la pauvreté dans les pays riche (1974) by Lionel Stoléru, enthusiast of American neo-liberal policy, to acknowledge this precedence in the debates regarding exclusion that began at the end of the 1980s.